He proceeds
afterwards,--"However, this is to be taken with a caution, that the
impossibility of otherwise discovering the truth is not construed from
hence, that other witnesses were not actually concerned, but that, from
the nature of the crime, or from regard had to the place and time, other
witnesses could not be present." Many other passages from the same
authority, and from others to a similar effect, might be added; we
shall only remark shortly, that Gaill, a writer on the practice of that
law the most frequently cited in our own courts, gives the rule more in
the form of a maxim,--"that the law is contented with such proof as
_can_ be made, if the subject _in its nature_ is difficult of
proof."[48] And the same writer, in another passage, refers to another
still more general maxim, (and a sound maxim it is,) that the power and
means of proof ought not to be narrowed, but enlarged, that the truth
may not be concealed: "_Probationum facultas non angustari, sed ampliari
debeat, ne veritas occultetur._"[49]
On the whole, your Committee can find nothing in the writings of the
learned in this law, any more than they could discover anything in the
Law of Parliament, to support any one of the determinations given by the
Judges, and adopted by the Lords, against the evidence which your
Committee offered, whether direct and positive, or merely (as for the
greater part it was) circumstantial, and produced as a ground to form
legitimate presumption against the defendant: nor, if they were to admit
(which they do not) this Civil Law to be of authority in furnishing any
rule in an impeachment of the Commons, more than as it may occasionally
furnish a principle of reason on a new or undetermined point, do they
find any rule or any principle, derived from that law, which could or
ought to have made us keep back the evidence which we offered; on the
contrary, we rather think those rules and principles to be in agreement
with our conduct.
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